Upwelling

Investigation 04

Mutable Densities

Tracking Buoyancy and Micro-Life Across Water Columns

Context

Opening / Context

I became fascinated by the Argo ocean observing system: a global network of autonomous floats moving through the oceans and gathering information about changing conditions in the water. The floats measure properties such as temperature and salinity and contribute their observations to a shared body of knowledge used by scientists and organisations around the world.

What interests me is not simply the technology, but the idea behind it: many individual instruments observing a vast, largely invisible environment, each contributing a small part to a much larger picture. It is an extraordinary example of collective scientific endeavour and shared purpose across nations.

I began to imagine what a small, local and poetic equivalent might look like. Inspired by Argo, I am developing a limited series of my own floats and vessels to gather information from the sea, rivers and estuary near me. They are not intended to replicate scientific instruments or produce equivalent numerical data sets. Instead, they translate the principle of observation into poetic and physical forms.

The work is concerned with mutable densities — the changing relationships between water, movement, salinity, temperature, suspended material and living organisms. I am interested in what happens across water columns and at the boundaries between different conditions: what moves, what settles, what rises, what is carried, and what becomes visible.

Each vessel can gather a different kind of information or trace from its environment: tidal movement, water movement, microbial and biological material, plant life, sediment, light, and the fragments carried by the water.

The work is grounded in repeated observation of my local environment. I visit the edges of the river and estuary, observing and documenting plant life and changes in the landscape. I photograph and identify specimens, take water samples, carry out water tests, and keep written notes from each visit. These observations form part of an accumulating record of the changing environment.

Making the floats

Alongside this fieldwork, I am designing and making the floats themselves, using locally bought and readily available materials. I am working with borosilicate vessels and the 1.5-litre glass jars that have become my Argo-inspired floats. Each vessel is carefully assembled for a particular purpose, with decisions about its materials, weight, movement, suspension and the conditions it will encounter in the water.

The making is not simply preparation for the experiment. It is part of the work itself — a performance of attention, care and anticipation. Although these vessels are not technical scientific equipment, they need to be carefully and thoughtfully made because they have a task to perform once they enter the water. Their construction establishes the conditions under which the water can leave its trace.

Experiments so far

Since I developed the series, two experiments have already produced results.

Drawing the Tide

uses a suspended charcoal mechanism within a sealed vessel. Movements of the water cause the mechanism to move, creating a physical drawing. The first successful test recorded a very low tidal movement. The drawing remained intact and revealed the event through a quiet marking. The next iteration of this particular experiment will be launched when the tide becomes more active.

Fleece Float

uses fleece wrapped around the outside of the vessel as a collector, allowing the water to leave a physical trace of what it carries. Material gathered by the fleece, together with material collected from the inside of the vessel and other fragments encountered during the experience, have subsequently been examined through microscopy. The samples have revealed diatoms, plant material and other small organisms, opening another level of observation beyond what can be seen with the naked eye.

This creates a chain of observation:

water → float → collected trace → microscope → image → interpretation

The float is therefore not the end of the process; it becomes an intermediary between the environment and another form of seeing. Something happens in the water, something is gathered by the float, and another instrument may then be needed to reveal what has been gathered.

From scientific method to poetic evidence

The idea of upwelling provides important scientific and conceptual resonance for the work. In marine ecosystems, the movement of deeper, nutrient-rich water to the surface can bring nutrients into the sunlit zone, supporting biological productivity and the growth of microscopic life, including phytoplankton and diatoms.

I am interested in this moment not as something I am attempting to reproduce or measure directly, but as a way of thinking about what is brought to the surface, what becomes available to be seen, and what forms of life and information might otherwise remain hidden.

My floats extend this question into the local environment.

Rather than translating everything into numbers, they produce drawings, collected materials, microscopic images, observations and written records. These become a form of poetic environmental evidence, grounded in real events and encounters with water rather than invented data.

The project is developing between scientific observation and poetic interpretation. Argo provides a model of distributed observation; marine biology provides another way of understanding what moves through and sustains the water; my local fieldwork and experiments provide the material encounter.

The resulting floats are both instruments and metaphors — carefully made vessels for gathering, revealing and responding to the changing life of the water.

The Work

1. Fleece Float